marketing, strategy, innovation & social media

Menu

Daily Archives: January 13, 2012

A few months ago, towards the end of 2011, as I delivered a pitch on social media ROI/ROE at the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam, I asked my team at Orange to put a social media dashboard together, one that would be monthly, more appealing to managers than the weekly slapdash XL fires were produce for ourselves, and yet would be a useful tool for decision-making. Here is – below – its December 2011 version.

As to engagement rates, this is yet another kettle of fish. We realised, in the course of our comparisons, that we were being penalised by social bakers for the wrong reasons. For instance, our account was filed as a British account (vs. global) which was penalising us. Secondly, we use polls a lot and they are supposedly not considered as part of the engagement rates by the system. Yet, we have found repeatedly that polls are a very valid way of engaging with our community and we have no intention to suppress them. Last but not least, our account is multilingual and multinational. This is perfectly normal for a company which is operating globally, that is to say in 35 countries from the B2C perspective, and 220 countries and territories from the B2B point of view. Whereas many of our competitors are not that global and therefore enjoy a much better engagement rate which is not justified, we actually choose to speak Polish to the Poles, Spanish to the Spaniards and French to the French-speaking audiences of Africa and other countries as well as English to everybody else, and to us this is perfectly normal ; yet, we are being penalised for this by social bakers.

note: no hard feelings against social bakers I think this is a very good tool, and a great company. I’m a happy customer. I am only aiming at improving the system/measure.

We are trying to work with them in order to correct this measurement, but might also introduce our own calculation in which we will introduce a new way of measuring engagement rates in order to correct this bias.

What we’re trying to prove here is not that measuring return on engagement and social media isn’t worth doing, on the contrary, but that there is a lot in our plates in order to correct all these numbers and systems, before we can rely on these numbers and move forward.